Milieu is a French term that doesn’t have a direct translation into English. It’s the environment something exists in, its surrounding context. Typically the word refers to a social setting a person lives or grew up in.
For example, my milieu is that I grew up in central Wisconsin in the 90s and 00s. My father was an engineer manager at a paper mill and my mom stayed home raising four kids. The paper industry was in its post-industrial decline and a young dreamer like myself wanted anything to escape that fate.
When I watched the movie October Sky, I felt like I was watching a version of my own life, except instead of dreaming of rockets to the moon it was painting landscapes. Instead of science fairs, fine art competitions were my co-curriculars.
In my undergraduate program, I took many art history classes and it quickly became my favorite subject. Art History offered a window into the historical circumstances around works of art, architecture, and cultural objects. Just as people have stories, the things we make are created from rich cultural narratives.
Art doesn’t get created in a vacuum.
There are social environments surrounding the work and the artist. There are trends, materials, and political, social, racial, economic realities (I could keep going) that exist at the same time an artwork is made.
In the same way art history explains the context of a piece, I think it’s fair that I take the time to explain the milieu of one of my new paintings.
JUNE Mountain Oil Painting No. 1
As seen in the picture above, this work depicts an abstracted landscape. The scraggly pine tree in the foreground grows atop a hill of flowers and grass which contrasts against the bright snow-covered mountain peak in the background.
Before I started this work, I was seeing people on social media making treks to the Himalayan mountains. I usually swoon over the mountains in the Alps or the northern Rockies (the key ingredient here is snow and pine trees), but these images and videos from the Himalayas were wholly mesmerizing.
The Himalayas reach so much higher than mountains elsewhere in the world. Their phenomenal heights mean the tallest peaks are forever encased in a sheet of snow and ice. But what stood out to me were the foothills, which were lush and green tropical forests. What would be considered significant mountains in some other place, stand as the foreground to these white monuments.
The peaks of the Himalayas stand immortal, literal deities in the local mythology. There is such a draw to them that no wonder they inspire both fear and endeavor.
As I sketched my painting out, it was not overlooked by me that this was a significantly larger work than I had painted in a while. Because of this, I wanted to create something tied deeply to my roots as a landscape artist. Some of the first landscape works I was drawn to in my adulthood were done by the Canadian Group of Seven and their informal member Tom Thomson (he passed away before the group was formed, but was fundamental to their national style).
The spirit of these early and mid-20th-century artists was the exploration of the wild and beautiful Canadian landscape. Landscape art for them would strive to create a national identity. Landscape is the milieu so to say for their identity. There was also this act of painting in the wilderness that was a deeply spiritual endeavor for them.
Continuing these same conversations today, I think I’m exploring not so much a national identity, but rather a personal one. I am usually in awe that I can pull up a search on the internet of any place on earth. I can explore any mountain from many angles and documented experiences.
This changes my relationship with the natural world. In thirty seconds I can virtually be in the foothills of Annapurna or with some means I could be planning to fly myself halfway around the world to be on my way to Mount Everest’s base camp. I can read and watch experience after experience of the world beyond my mountain-less home in Minnesota.
I don’t know fully what this does to us as humans. It’s a mix between being finite and yet infinite at the same time. In my mind I’m in these places, yet my experience is being filtered through a window I can’t reach out of to feel the breeze or smell the damp dirt beneath the melting glacier.
In painting this piece I sought to work quickly. This felt contrary to the subject of the mountain, which has existed on the horizon for millions of eons and will be for millions more to come.
I’m feeling deeply existential as I write this. I want to be like this mountain but I’m forgetting about this weary tree I painted in the foreground.
My daughter was born last fall and the time until now has rushed away so fast I blinked and she’s so close to turning one. In some way, I think this influenced the painting of this work, it had to have. Time is running out and I have so much to live and so much to paint.
I didn’t want to fuss over the details painting this. I wanted a lot of abstraction in the composition. Typically when I paint I agonize over how far to push the realism of the scene. But not this work.
I spend weeks sometimes months looking at a blank canvas. This one was standing as a white sheet in my living room for two months. Every day I imagined what this painting would become, and then in a single coat, I painted away.
I thought maybe I would go back and touch up the atmospheric perspective, maybe I would add highlights and shadows to the tree and flowers of the hill. But no, this single pass at this composition was good enough. It was the testament I needed it to be.
My role as the artist is complete and as the art historian, I have to wonder why this painting is meaningful to me. I feel calm looking at it — like I’m in the presence of something eternal.